Iomart and Viglen told ‘You’re hired’

IOMART and Viglen, the IT supplier owned by Lord Alan Sugar’s Amstrad Group, have won a six-figure contract to provide cloud computing services to the UK government.

Iaomart is working with Viglen, the IT supplier owned by Lord Sugars Amstrad Group. Picture: PA

The £100,000 contract runs for a year and is the first major government win for Iomart-cloud, the Glasgow-based group’s specialist subsidiary. Under the agreement, the partners will provide services for the gov.uk website.

Viglen is run by chief executive Bordan Tkachuk, a long-time associate of Sugar best known for his guest appearances on The Apprentice. The firm provides storage systems, workstations, servers and communications equipment, and has been part of Amstrad since 1994.

Iomart will provide off-site machines, storage and back-up from its UK data centres. Government Digital Services (GDS), which runs gov.uk, will manage this “virtual” equipment with Iomart’s bespoke software.

Founded in 1998 by chief executive Angus MacSween, Iomart has spent the past six years focused on cloud computing in a bid to capitalise upon the growing trend among companies to shift IT infrastructure off-site.

It is a strategy that has paid off for the Aim-quoted company, with revenues in its last financial year up by nearly a third to £43.1 million. Pre-tax profits more than doubled to £10.7m.

MacSween said: “I am delighted that Iomartcloud has been selected as one of the main suppliers for gov.uk.

“This is our first major contract win under the G-Cloud framework and underlines our ability to provide the scalable and flexible infrastructure to support the most complex public sector projects. It also shows that G-Cloud is opening up the opportunity for a wider group of cloud services providers to successfully compete for government contracts.”

The G-Cloud framework aims to make it easier for government departments and other public sector bodies to buy cloud services from a list of pre-vetted suppliers.

The latest framework was announced in October and includes 999 suppliers, of which 84 per cent are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). There are now 1,186 suppliers on the two live G-Cloud frameworks, with 84 per cent being SMEs.

Gov.uk is the single domain for government services that went live in October 2012. It averages more than nine million weekly visits.

Iomartcloud and Viglen are listed jointly on the G-Cloud framework offering services in three categories: infrastructure as a service (IaaS); platform as a service (PaaS); and software as a service (SaaS).

Michael Ruddick, head of Channel EMEA for Iomartcloud, said the new contract underlined the increasing shift towards cloud computing in the public sector.

Iomart has been boosting its organic growth with acquisitions, completing its biggest deal to date in October with the £23m purchase of Yorkshire-based Backup Technology. That followed September’s £6.6m acquisition of Redstation in Hampshire.